In-N-Out Burger (4 page)

Esther's desire to attend college was stalled when her grandmother suffered a stroke and was left unable to walk. Esther remained in Sorento in order to take care of her grandmother, putting off her studies until 1939, when she enrolled in Greenville College (part of
the Free Methodist Church). An aunt paid for her first two years of tuition. “She thought I deserved it,” Esther later explained. But her grandfather and uncles seemed perplexed as to why a young lady like Esther wanted to pursue a college education. “Don't you want to get married?” they regularly asked her. To which she replied: “I like to learn.” During the mornings, Esther cared for her grandmother. In the afternoons, she studied elementary school education at Greenville; upon returning home in the evenings, she took care of the household chores.

In November 1940, Esther's grandmother sickened; Esther quit college altogether to look after her grandmother full-time. Four months later, after the death of her grandmother, Esther spent the summer in Sorento working a few jobs, including one at the post office. She borrowed $150 and returned to Greenville College. After earning the equivalent of a teaching certificate, Esther began teaching second grade at Sorento's primary school.

It was while Esther was working as a schoolteacher in her hometown that the United States entered World War II. In 1943, Esther joined the war effort, signing up as one of the navy's newly created WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) at the recruitment office down in St. Louis. It was a bold move for a shy girl from rural Illinois. The WAVES were designated by special order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to fill the vacancies created by the tens of thousands of men who had been sent to the battlefront. While not eligible for combat duty, WAVES performed a number of jobs previously uncharacteristic for women in the military. In explaining her reasons for joining the navy, Esther remarked, “I thought I might enjoy radio or hospital work. My parents didn't really comment on it. But my sisters thought it was wonderful.”

Esther—who had very little experience outside of Sorento before enlisting—was sent to New York City, where she attended boot camp at Hunter College in the Bronx. By special war decree, Hunter was transformed from a college to a naval training ground. Once there, the new recruits spent several weeks immersed in naval organization, administration, and history. In addition, the women were subjected to
an intensive program of marching drills and medical exams as well as a battery of aptitude tests. Following boot camp, they were dispatched to their duty stations. Esther was sent to the San Diego Naval Hospital; the navy proved to be her ticket out of the farms and coal mines and the chronic privations of Bond County, Illinois—just as it was for the many young men across the country that had enlisted in droves.

For the first time, the war put women on an equal footing with men, if only temporarily. WAVES recruiting posters from the period promoted the idea of women contributing to the war effort as central players and not merely as support staff to the men. They depicted females with expressions of serious purpose. They had carefully coiffed hair, wore smart uniforms, and performed such roles as air traffic controllers and parachute riggers. Underscoring the posters' imagery were their taglines. “Share the Deed of Victory,” said one. “Don't Miss Your Great Opportunity,” implored another.

In her official navy portrait, Esther appears transformed from the mousy, shy girl of her student years to a picture of 1940s glamour and sophistication—not unlike one of the WAVES in those navy recruitment posters. Gone are the glasses and the slumped shoulders of her high school yearbook. Instead, Esther wears an expression of self-assuredness. She is smiling brightly and her lips are painted a dark shade of crimson. Under Esther's smart navy cap, her face is framed by a short, stylish bob of curls. It seems that in the navy, Esther blossomed.

Esther Johnson spent the next three years (until November 1945) in the navy. Among her duties, she served as a surgical nurse and a pharmacist's mate. Her time visiting with burn victims left a lasting impression—it was the reason that Esther became a lifelong supporter of veterans' causes. When the war ended and Esther left the navy, she had earned the rank of pharmacist's mate second class.

Following the war and her discharge, Esther returned briefly to Sorento to visit with her family. During her service, Esther had become enchanted by the West Coast, and following the war it was her desire to resume her college studies. A like-minded girlfriend had some friends in Seattle, and the pair decided to head to Washington.
Esther enrolled at Seattle Pacific University, earning a degree in zoology while working the night shift at a laundry and later becoming a manager at the restaurant at Fort Lawton.

One day in September 1947, while working her shift at the restaurant, she caught the eye of Harry Snyder. “He just came in to deliver sandwich boxes,” she remembered. “Boxes and boxes of sandwiches.” At thirty-four, Harry was seven years Esther's senior and a head taller than her. He was a sturdy man with a long face, a broad nose, and large basset hound eyes. A no-nonsense kind of fellow, he was not a particularly tall man or classically handsome, but he carried himself well. “He had real friendly eyes,” Esther later recalled, “full of energy.” Although she found him “nosey” at first—“he was asking all these questions and found out about your life history in no time,” she said—Esther soon warmed to him.

The pair seemed to complement each other perfectly. While Harry was tough and could be demanding, Esther, widely regarded as a gentle soul, did much to soften Harry's rougher edges. He had street sense; she was book smart. Where he was a maverick, a visionary, she was grounded, practical. Harry was hard-nosed; Esther was sentimental. He was a forceful presence, while she preferred to get things done quietly, behind the scenes. They were both kindhearted souls who shared a generosity of spirit. Harry believed in his ability to create his own opportunities—and Esther believed in Harry.

After a brief courtship, the pair married in 1948. They decided to leave Seattle and start their life together in Southern California. Harry, who grew up there and whose family now owned a bakery, arrived first; Esther joined him a few months later. At Fort Lawton, Harry had developed take-out bagged lunches to serve the scores of soldiers passing through and he had come up with an idea for a new kind of restaurant. America was on the verge of entering a new age, and Southern California was lighting the way. And so, just as several previous generations of the Johnson and Snyder families had pressed forward, pulling up stakes, chasing down the promise of a brighter future, Esther and Harry were starting over—together.

The new couple set their sights on a rural town called Baldwin Park, seventeen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, in the heart of the picturesque San Gabriel Valley. When the Snyders arrived, Baldwin Park looked much as it had when it was pasture land belonging to the San Gabriel Mission. Some seven thousand people lived within the town's pastoral 6.8-square-mile stretch, nestled among acres of orange groves and citrus orchards that were still protected from the frost by black smudge pots. Largely undeveloped, Baldwin Park was primarily made up of small farms, vineyards, chicken and cattle ranches, and dairy farms. Rows of eucalyptus, black walnut, and pepper trees shaded its dusty roads like army regiments that gave way to open fields crowned by blue skies, ringed by the improbably snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains, and bathed in the rays of the sun.

Despite Baldwin Park's rural American setting, its residents proudly claimed two symbols of modernity. Leafy Morgan Park with its lighted baseball field was built before the Depression, costing some $28,000. Perhaps more significantly, Baldwin Park could boast that it was on the new Pacific Electric Railway line. Built in 1902, the Pacific Electric was the largest electric interurban system in the world at the time. Running sixty trains daily between San Bernardino and Los Angeles, the Red Line ferried passengers from the Baldwin Park depot to downtown Los Angeles in thirty-five minutes flat. Before In-
N-Out Burger, the biggest name in Baldwin Park was the traveling Al G. Barnes Circus. With no fewer than twelve hundred performing animals, Barnes billed itself as the largest wild animal circus in the world. In 1927, the flamboyant Al Barnes snapped up a quarter-mile tract of land facing Valley Boulevard for roughly $200,000 for use as the circus's winter camp after he was forced to leave his previous encampment in Culver City (where locals had grown wary of boisterous circus employees, who reportedly bought liquor from bootleggers—homeowners also complained that during feeding time, they could hear the roar of lions a mile away).

The residents of Baldwin Park happily adopted the circus and its numerous creatures. During a building binge, circus elephants were used to pull down trees and haul away timber later used to build homes. Indeed, the circus gave the town a measure of fame, attracting some of Hollywood's tinsel when the Paramount movie studio used the Barnes lot to film
King of the Jungle
with Buster Crabbe. Delighted residents were used as extras. The town's thrilling circus days came to an end in 1938 when the show was finally shut down not long after Ringling Brothers purchased it.

 

When Harry and his new bride arrived, the couple found an unexceptional town of wide-open spaces filled with restless teens. A bucolic stretch on the citrus belt, Baldwin Park had only received dial-up telephone lines three years earlier. In 1948, Baldwin Park was on the verge of transmuting into yet another car-obsessed suburb of Los Angeles. Like the rest of Southern California, Baldwin Park was undergoing a rapid transformation fueled almost exclusively by postwar development.

World War II was already receding into the past. New borders were being drawn and a new geopolitical landscape was being defined. The British Empire was in its twilight years; India and Pakistan were independent from both the United Kingdom and from each other. And the United States had quickly stepped out from behind England, establishing itself as the strongest, most influential, and
most productive nation in the world. In something of a surprise, Harry S. Truman was reelected president of the United States, soundly defeating Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey. And Truman was Baldwin Park's kind of fellow. Its voters, reported the
Baldwin Park Tribune
, had “upset Republican hopes, confound[ed] Mr. Gallup and surprise[d] even members of the Democratic party.” An undisputed optimism was sweeping the land, and nowhere was that more obvious than in Southern California.

Lured by the promise of opportunity, a mild climate, and relatively inexpensive real estate hitched to an enormous economic rocket, the Snyders—like hundreds of thousands of other newcomers—moved to the Southland in record numbers. Los Angeles had earned a reputation as something of a flourishing boomtown, benefitting greatly from the fact that it was situated on one of the most verdant agricultural belts in the country. And throughout much of the 1920s and 1930s, the Southland enjoyed a prosperity buoyed by the oil and movie industries.

During the early 1940s, California played a tremendous role in the country's war effort. The military unfurled its industrial flags across the state; defense contractors established huge manufacturing centers, the aerospace industry set up shop, factories were built, and military bases were erected. Between 1939 and 1945, federal spending reached more than $35 billion in California, making it the third largest manufacturing center in the country behind New York and Michigan. The ripple effect was enormous. Waves of growth radiated out from Los Angeles like a fan. New jobs were created, new development and infrastructure followed the jobs, and an influx of new residents trailed closely behind; the average personal income tripled. As a result, throughout the war years, some 1.6 million Americans migrated to California. Many received their military training here, while others touched down on their way to the frontlines of the Pacific theater. Following V-Day, a number of those who had gotten a taste of the Golden State decided they didn't want to leave.

It was nothing less than a mass exodus of Americans. Indeed, between 1940 and 1950, the state population swelled from 6.9 million
to 10.5 million, an increase of approximately 52 percent. Between July 1945 and July 1947, more than a million people resettled in California—many ended up in the Southland. In the words of writer and social commentator Sarah Comstock, “As New York is the melting pot for the peoples of Europe, so Los Angeles is the melting pot for the peoples of the United States.”

Baldwin Park quickly became one of the fastest-growing postwar communities in this vast and growing melting pot. By the time the Snyders arrived, the number of inhabitants had nearly doubled from its prewar population (by 1956 it would nearly quadruple to 28,056). In 1948, after the local post office reported an all-time high of $65,000 worth of postal receipts, the
Baldwin Park Tribune
concluded, “Since the business done by the post office is considered a reliable weather vane of community progress, the receipts for 1948 can be taken as an indication of a doubling of the importance of the community during the past ten years.” A less strictly numerical (although no less noteworthy) indicator of Baldwin Park's growth was the fact that the town now boasted eighteen different churches, all supporting their own congregations of Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Catholics, among others.

The surge of people and activity in Baldwin Park led to a resumption of the growth and prosperity that had been paralyzed by the Depression. A number of the large ranches had been broken up and subdivided into smaller lots and sold at bargain prices. While the scent of citrus had always filled the air in the San Gabriel Valley, now, for the first time since before the stock market crash of 1929, the air was thick with new possibilities.

New residents were pouring into Baldwin Park at a rate that out-paced available housing. Many families ended up living in the numerous trailer parks that had emerged in the wake of a significant housing shortage. One of the largest, Baldy View, had been built on a circular piece of property on the northeastern corner of Garvey Avenue, alongside Johnny No-Bones Steakhouse #1, with a permit to operate 180 camp spaces. The housing boom attracted numerous speculators and developers; they bought up large tracts of land, turning the
San Gabriel Valley (along with the San Fernando Valley) into what historian and author Mike Davis called a “real estate casino.”

For the average American, home ownership seemed an unobtainable dream before the war. But it was well within the grasp of many during the postwar boom, partially as a result of the generous GI Bill that offered $2,000 home loan guaranties. Indeed, between 1944 and 1952, the Veterans Administration backed nearly $2.4 million in home loans for World War II veterans. In Baldwin Park, shortly after the war, a desirable two-bedroom house with a double lot cost between $6,650 and $8,500. And a large percentage of the town's new housing developments were specifically built with the influx of veterans in mind.

One residential builder, Louis Rudnick, developed a tract of two-bedroom houses with the lofty sounding name “the Baldwin Park Estates.” They were generally referred to simply as “GI homes,” and were made available to veterans “with no down payment except escrow and impound costs.” The houses boasted such features as automatic garbage disposals and plenty of closet and storage space. Another developer, Home Builders Institute, constructed a tract known as the Baldwin Park Homes. They were two-and three-bedroom dwellings along Los Angeles Street at Merced Street, between Las Tunas Drive and Ramona Boulevard, and were offered to veterans for “as low as $250 down.” Baldwin Park's rural landscape of orchards, dairy farms, ranches, and citrus groves was fast being transformed into stretches of ranch houses and cottages with detached garages.

The Snyders moved into a small one-bedroom house on the corner of Vineland and Francisquito avenues, across the street from the Baldy View trailer park. It was a time marked by uncomplicated formality, of starched white shirts for men and peplum skirts for women, and of hopefulness and sanguinity for all. The era carried all of the hallmarks that came to be associated with Southern California—a place where the past could be cleared away in order to build a brighter future. Indeed it was during this period that a Chicago-transplant, cartoonist, and animator named Walt Disney bought up 160 acres of orange groves and walnut trees in Anaheim and erected an homage to his dreams that he named Disneyland.

Harry Snyder's dream was a modest one. He was going to start his own little food business—a hamburger stand. Harry had good reason to want to go into business for himself; a child of the Great Depression, he watched his father shift between the Vancouver shipyards and the boom-bust cycle of Seattle in search of work before moving his family down to Southern California in search of yet another opportunity, only to land in the middle of the greatest economic decline in American history. Harry was determined to live a different sort of life. It wasn't greed that drove him; he was simply determined to create his own future.

With the war over, Harry had a strong gut feeling. Although he had a couple of failed businesses under his belt, he believed that following the Depression and years of war and shortages, people would be in the mood to enjoy life. Harry wanted to serve quality food at a reasonable price, and as quickly as possible. “We really have to have a place where people can get their sandwiches and go,” he said. Harry and Esther would open a new kind of hamburger stand—the drive-through—catering to an increasingly mobile society. A typical entrepreneur, Harry was rich in ideas but short on cash. Early on, he took on a partner, a man named Charles Noddin, who agreed to finance the venture. Noddin reportedly put up some $5,000 in start-up capital.

 

Harry Snyder's instinct was a good one. Southern California was the most heavily motorized place on the planet. Already by 1940 there were over 1 million cars in Los Angeles—five automobiles for every four families. It was reported at the time that Angelinos spent more money on their cars than their clothes. Moreover, the Los Angeles Police Department had more traffic officers than the San Francisco Police Department had policemen on their entire force.

In the wake of World War II, small food stands selling burgers, tamales, and hot dogs were spreading across the Southland like wild-fire. They were—at least in the beginning—little more than shacks fronted by a couple of stools, needing only a minimal amount of space.

The legendary Original Tommy's World Famous Hamburgers got its start when Oklahoma City–born Tommy Koulax, the son of Greek immigrants, began selling his twelve-ounce chili cheeseburgers out of an eight-foot by fifteen-foot cinderblock stand on the corner of Beverly and Rampart boulevards in downtown Los Angeles. Koulax, a shipyard welder during World War II, initially used his 1929 Model A Ford as his storeroom. On May 15, 1946, Tommy's first day of business, Koulax drummed up eight dollars in sales. “My grandmother told me he spent so much time there that he slept on top of the onion sacks,” recalled Koulax's granddaughter Dawna Bernal. So busy was the “Shack,” as it was affectionately known, that in 1949, Koulax turned Tommy's into a twenty-four-hour stand, enlarging the tiny space by adding an awning. In 1965, Koulax was able to purchase the entire southeast corner of Beverly and Rampart (eventually he came to own three of the four corners). And in 1970, Koulax boasted that Tommy's had raked in $1 million; soon he began to expand his popular chain across Los Angeles. When Koulax died in 1992 at the age of seventy-three, there were seventeen Tommy stands and the original was selling twenty-five thousand burgers each week.

Like Tommy's, many of the stands were fairly lucrative. There was a demand for cheap food from a constant flow of customers who worked in nearby factories, mills, offices, and shops. Not coincidentally, this casual new way of dining dovetailed with the rise of car culture and the establishment of the extensive interstate highway system that was starting to crisscross the nation. With better roads, people could travel farther. Along the way people would need places to rest, sleep, and above all eat.

These little burger stands heralded a new way of eating. And this new way of eating eventually had an impact on America's economy, topography, popular culture, and even the way Americans were viewed abroad. In time, there were negative consequences, to be sure, but in the period immediately following World War II, these little burger stands signaled sweeping changes in the country. And the capital of this grand sweep of changes was Southern California, where love for the automobile was perhaps only rivaled by love for the hamburger.